<!--thumb|Flag of Ebon Atoll-->
Ebon Atoll (Marshallese: , ) is a coral atoll of 22 islands in the Pacific Ocean, forming a legislative district of the Ralik Chain of the Marshall Islands. Its land area is , and it encloses a deep lagoon with an area of . A winding passage, the Ebon Channel, leads to the lagoon from the southwest edge of the atoll. Ebon Atoll is approximately south of Jaluit, and it is the southernmost land mass of the Marshall Islands, on the southern extremity of the Ralik Chain. In documents and accounts from the 1800s, it was also known as Boston, Covell's Group, Fourteen Islands, and Linnez.
History
thumb|left| U.S.M.C. Private Theodore James Miller exhibiting the [[thousand-yard stare after two days of constant fighting in the Battle of Eniwetok. He was later killed in action, at age 19, on 24 March 1944, at Ebon Atoll. He is buried at the Punchbowl Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii]]
Ebon Atoll was visited by commercial whaling vessels in the 19th century. The first such vessel on record was the Newark in 1837. The last whaler known to have visited was the Andrew Hicks in 1905.
The schooner Glencoe was taken and its crew massacred by Marshallese at Ebon in 1851 – one of three vessels attacked in the Marshall Islands in 1851 and 1852.
Ebon was claimed by the German Empire along with the rest of the Marshall Islands in 1885. After World War I, the island came under the South Seas Mandate of the Empire of Japan, which had a garrison there late in World War II. The base became part of the vast US Naval Base Marshall Islands. At the end of WW II, Ebon Atoll became a part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands under the control of the United States, until the independence of the Marshall Islands in 1986.
On January 30, 2014, castaway José Salvador Alvarenga, a Salvadoran national who had been working in Mexico as a fisherman, was found by locals from Ebon after he had pulled his boat ashore on Enienaitok [Tile] Islet at the conclusion of a 14-month drifting voyage of 10,800 kilometers (6,700 miles) across the Pacific.
Demography
thumb|Journal des Museum Godeffroy entry on Ebon atoll, dating to the late 19th century cultural studies of Ebon
In the period between 1920 and 1999, different governmental officials have conducted eleven census reports from Ebon, with an average total population of 735 people. The lowest count was under the Japanese colonial power in 1925, with 552 people, and the highest in 1999 — 20 years after independence — with 902 people. At the 2021 census, the atoll had a population of 469 people. The same report also notes that Ebon is among the atolls and islands of the Marshalls with a positive net migration rate — even though the population has decreased by 196 since the 1999 census. It is also curious to note that various German sources claim a significantly higher population — ranging from 1,000 to 2,000 people — in a 46-year period, 1860–1906. Moreover, in an unpublished interview series with Leonard Mason in 1949–1950, Dwight Heine (an Ebon local) tells of a legendary typhoon that swept Ebon sometime in the 1850s, the aftermath of which left the atoll population decimated.